What is Fotchbook?

Fotchbook - Fächbu?k - a site which allows you to proudly display your fotches to the world.

Fotch ? Fäch ? The frontal part of the head which includes the forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, nostrils, ears, cheeks, mouth, lips, chin and surrounding skin and hair.

If you haven?t figured it out yet, fotch refers to the face. The word was made up, but stems from the Italian word for face: "faccia" Ex: faccia bella- a beautiful face

When used properly, Fotch is a stronger and more effective word for conveying your message:

"Wow I feel like castaway, I haven?t seen a fotch in years! "
"You must have really got her angry? she gave you quite a fotch! "
"Babe, I love your fotch! "

Why Fotchbook?

As you may know, there are many social networks similar to Fotchbook out there: aSmallWorld, Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Pownce, Twitter and Xanga are just a few out of the hundreds of different ?social networking? sites out there. Fotchbook is not looking to ask users to simply quit out of these sites and use only Fotchbook (although we would be honored), instead we want you to use Fotchbook in conjunction with these sites.

Fotchbook is more than just another social networking site. By joining Fotchbook, you are participating in a world-wide human experiment. The goal of Fotchbook.com is to chronicle the wide range of human emotions throughout the different countries and cultures around the world. Do you believe that emotion is constant throughout the world? Does an excited person in America look the same as an excited person in Antarctica? With your help, Fotchbook is here to find out!

As a member of Fotchbook, termed "Fotcher", you will have the ability to upload your fotch in varying emotions. For example, on your page you can have your happy fotch, sad fotch, excited fotch and bored fotch. You can then use these fotches in interesting ways, by inserting them into messages you send to other fotchers so that people can actually see your emotion (from your fotch) rather than those silly yellow emoticon we are all used to. You will also be able to search and compare fotches by emotion, country and gender.

Fotchbook has also tried to eliminate problems other social sites face. The MySpace Top 8 (or 5?) is constantly causing disputes among friends because everybody wants to be in their friend?s top list. Is it really fair for a social site to force you to rank your friends? Fotchbook eliminates this problem by allowing you to have as many friends as you please and showing three random friends (and their corresponding random fotches) on your page. With enough friends, your fotcher page should never look the same twice!

Fotchbook also allows you to "purchase" items similarly to facebook. The only difference is that instead of being charged physical money, fotchers can purchase items using ?points? which are earned just by being an active member.

Fotchbook has more interesting features than other social networking sites, which allow you to find fotches closest to yours and to participate in automatic fotch tagging. You'll find more about this in the sections below.

Fotchbook is not limited to any race, culture, country or gender. We are built upon the idea that diversity is key. We would love to have you become a fotcher and invoke others to do the same. So Join today!

Fotchers

We are continually striving to expand our userbase all over the world in search of categorizing every human emotion in all the different cultures and countries representing mankind. Join today and put yourself on the map!

Fotch Detection

Humans have an uncanny ability to distinguish and recognize people by their fotch. It has been reported that by two months of age, specific areas of the brain are activated specifically for viewing and recognizing fotches (Nelson, 2001). Fotchbook features fotch detection ? and fotch recognition ? technologies. Without getting into unnecessary detail, each fotch exhibits haar-like features which are recognized by a computer algorithm. Read more -> Here

The program inspects the image in small rectangles at a time, summing up the value of the pixels in that area (based on color). In theory the value of this sum is different for a region of a face than for say a region of a wall. The program is ?trained? to recognize faces from many sets of training images and the result of the training is saved in a haarcascade. The cascade is then run on the image to determine the coordinates of any detected fotches and/or fotch features (such as eyes, nose, mouth). These coordinates are then stored in the database and used to compare fotches. In theory, the distance between your eyes, R eye and nose, L eye and nose, R eye and mouth, L eye and mouth and nose and mouth are unique to your fotch. These values are then used to find fotches that are similar.